While Westminster has fixated on an EU referendum that may or may not take place in 2017, rather less attention has been paid to a referendum that is certain to happen, that on Scottish independence next year.
With the Yes campaign behind in the polls, the SNP is attempting to regain the initiative by launching a new paper on the economic case for independence. Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has pointed to six areas in which she claims Westminster is “is hindering Scotland’s potential”. They are:
– The decision by the last two UK governments to cut capital spending, which would have supported an extra 19,000 jobs in Scotland.
– Westminster’s failure to store oil revenues in a sovereign wealth fund, comparable to that in Norway, now worth an estimated £450bn.
– The debt and credit boom presided over by the last Labour government.
– The increase in income inequality witnessed under every government since Margaret Thatcher’s.
– The concentration of economy activity in London at the expense of the rest of the UK.
– The coalition government’s decision to pursue austerity, rather than a growth-led economic strategy.
After seeing off Nigel Farage last week, Alex Salmond was in ebullient form on the Today programme this morning, rattling off statistics showing that over the last five years, an independent Scotland would have been £8bn better off and that over the last 30 years, Scotland had contributed more per head in taxation than the UK average.
The First Minister went on to offer a clue to his improved mood when he cited a new poll showing that while the Yes campaign trails the No campaign by 44 to 36 points (a smaller gap than in some others), when the prospect of UK withdrawal from the EU is raised the two sides draw level on 44 points each. The poll showed that while the issue of EU withdrawal has little effect on those Scots who have already made up their mind, among undecided voters three times as many support independence as oppose it under those circumstances. “I would say it’s all to play for,” Salmond concluded. On that point, he is right. The biggest advantage that Salmond has is time. By September 2014, he hopes that the full force of the coalition’s spending cuts, less than half of which have been introduced, will have persuaded Scotland that the time is right to go it alone.
Incidentally, on the EU, it’s worth noting an important story in today’s FT, which reports that Germany plans to avoid the full scale renegotiation that David Cameron hopes to use to repatriate powers from Brussels. It notes that while Merkel is sympathetic to Cameron’s desire to improve Europe’s economic competitiveness, “she is convinced that this can only be done by improving the process of European decision-making and not simply by repatriating powers to national capitals.” So long as this remains the case, it will be difficult for Cameron to persuade his ever more eurosceptic party that is should vote to stay in. And that, as Salmond knows, plays into his hands.
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